Initial Press Release - Final Version

Ryan and Raymond:

Please review your quotes and the rest of the press release for accuracy as well as content. Two issues:

I have yet to add a name for the product, only because I was unsure if we wanted to use that, or if we wished to use a Project Name. I would reccomend a Project name in the interim.

I still have no information on Brian. Am I omitting him from this press release on purpose?

See next post:

Project and Development Team Announced!

11 APRIL 2005 - Vertexworks.com Community - (YetToBeNamedProject) is pleased to announce that a project team has formed. Seven individuals throughout the world were selected from a large list of applicants. They include: Software Developers Susan Otwell (sotwell) of Israel and Jason Coward (opengeek) of San Angelo, TX., Technical Writer Dave Denis (davedenis) of Boston, MA., Project Manager and Code Optimizer Travis Sitzlar (infoclipper) of Chatanooga, TN., and Marketing and Public Relations Aide John Vilsack (SpeedStreet) of Saint Paul, MN.

The idea to develop (yetotbenamedproject) officially began in March of 2005, however it always seemed like a logical choice. (yettobenamedproject) started out as MODx, a collaborative effort between (yettobenamedproject) founders Raymond Irving (xwisdom) of Jamaica and Ryan Thrash (rthrash) of Dallas, Texas. The founders both bring a wide variety of specialties to the table, as well as a strong commitment to a team atmosphere, positive community involvement, and the open source software movement.

MODx was a large-scale modification to the open-source project Etomite, created by Alex Butters. The modification added critical essentials to a maturing product based on its users needs.

Due to a huge groundswell of support from the user community, the desire to expand upon MODx became almost as much of an anticipated topic as the upcoming release of the next version of Etomite. It seemed as if the MODx tool was adding functionality to the product that would have placed Etomite in the mainstream race of Content Management Systems (or CMS for short).

In early March, Etomite's software development team announced that the future of Etomite was in the commercial sector. Due to issues with the GPL License that Etomite was built upon, the name Etomite and the existing software structure as its community had known it would cease to exist.

Luckily, the GPL License allows other open source projects to establish concurrent software development known in the community as "forks." After the sudden temporary shutdown of the Etomite site, Thrash and Irving quickly formed a small contingent of users dedicated to the continuation of open source development of an easy to use content and code manager for web sites.

"We've spent a lot of time balancing tremendous power and features with efficiency and being able to quickly learn the system", Irving had to say about his decision to mature the MODx modification into its own software package.

Today, the development team of (yettobenamedproject) is currently working on its initial release which will include: a user-friendly installer, new WYSIWYG editors with options to add many, granular user privileges to edit only certain parts of each website, and a cross-browser, feature-rich editor that is compliant with many different browsers.

"We're turning out a CMS that is simple, smart and sexy” Ryan Thrash said about (yettobenamedproduct)’s appeal. "Simple because it'll be intuitive and easy to manipulate, even for non-coders. Smart because it hides an incredibly robust API and core behind a simple interface. And sexy because it just works so well; it doesn't force you into working any one way"

If it were any dead in here, George Romero might be interested in making a movie about it!

Please, final thoughts and comments please! Plus, I need resolution on my two final matters!

Sorry for delay... busy on getting stuff together. Raymond and I discussed project name: MODx it is for now. It won't last long though as the code should be publicly viewable in a week or so, if not sooner.

Brian Oberkirch of New Orleans, LA is on the Marketing Team. (We meet at least once a week face-to-face on it. )

Raymond is from Kingston, Jamaica.

More soon!

Hi,

Sorry about the delay in responding.

I like it! It's sounding great!

Is there anything else that you need me to do?

Keep up the good work

K...now. with the final version....what would you like me to do with it?

Slashdot! I'd love to see if we can survive a Slashdotting! (just kidding, really.)

honestly I might be better described as Product Strategy since I'm trying to help more with that than technical writing at the moment. I'm quite keen at aping features from $100K CMSs :wink:

OK John, we're getting really close to our preview release I think with last nights late night file wrangling.

With that said, with the preview release, we'll also want to fix up the last few changes above and get ready to announce the team via this release along with the technology preview. We'll post in the announcements thread here, on the temporary page at vertexworks.com, and then I'm open to suggestions as to where else. Perhaps on openCMS.com?

We're not far off from an official branded unveiling I think!

I think that the development post should go here. I think the next step is to draft a product release press release that runs concurrent with the unveiling of the software.

Should I be working on the other things like logos/design/color scheme/etc? Or is this all being handled? With as many marketers as developers, its tough to know what I'm supposed to be focusing on